by Indrajit Sundaram
In the previous post Touchdown on Planet Mumbai, we entered the New York of India, and touched a teensy, tippy-tip top of a bit of life in the Mumbai fast lane. However, Mumbai is a truly cosmopolitan city, and in the next few days my daughter Hannah and I spent there, we were able to slow down and catch a bite of a truly delightful piece of the Mumbai pie, or should I say pao? More on this later.
It so happened that an old college friend, now pastor of the Highway Church in Mumbai, blessed us with an excellent stay at the YMCA Central Branch near Colaba, within walking distance of the famous Gateway of India, the Lion’s Gate entrance to the Naval Dockyard, the Prince of Wales Museum (now shortened to Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya), and the Colaba Causeway with all manner of shops, cafes, and other places of both practical as well as historical interest. Of course, I will, just tokenly, resist the urge to turn this into a readable home-movie.
So, let me start by saying that the YMCA beds also did not have bubbles, much like the beds in Bubble Beds, the backpacker’s den in Kolkata that we had stayed in just before we headed to Mumbai. In fact, the Y (as I used to call it back in the day) gave us a very nice AC room with clean, comfortable beds that were tidied and reset every day, a wooden cupboard with hangers and a nice wooden study table. The bathroom was roomy and very clean with an actual working geyser (that we Indians call water heating electrical appliances fixed in bathrooms). In addition to this, breakfast every day was complimentary, and all for about $42 a day! It was the perfect place for Hannah and me to catch our breath as we were still reeling from the sensory overwhelm of Mumbai’s Phoenix Palladium Mall.
After a much-needed nap, Hannah and I stepped out of the Y into the quiet, tree-lined lane, thanked God for kind friends and a great location, and made a beeline for the Gateway of India seafront about 10 minutes’ walk away. Aaand…there it was- the Gateway with its hordes of people of various intention and form, and the myriad boats heaving on the greenish-grey swell, and because it was Mumbai, one could finally find one’s own space and feel alone in the throng, right there in the midst of tootling paper horns, honking cars, chatting groups and insistent vendors. Hannah and I were able to find our space after our hectic travel, initial overwhelm, and enjoy a sense of having time to ourselves. We started to breathe, and that made all the difference for us in Mumbai.
We moved on then to find the sugar cane juice outlet I remembered, run by an ex-armyman, just a couple of minutes away from the Gateway. It was fantastic to enjoy a large glass of pure, sweet sugar cane juice for just over a dollar. Certainly, here is the place to retire to if you have a strong stomach and a good bit of $$s in hand. The Indian Rupee doesn’t convert value nearly as nicely.
By the way, did I ever tell you that I am keen on food? Mumbai truly marches on its stomach, and over our all too short a stay in Mumbai, Hannah and I were treated by very kind friends to food and drink (sometimes healthy) in swanky joints with such witty names that even I can’t remember them. The treat, however, was the streetfood. I was glad to have got Hannah to sample the humble vadapao in its original form. That’s a gramflour coated spicy potato mash called vada,deep fried and pressed between the two halves of locally baked bread called pao, and costing just 20c!
Vadapao with its attendant salted green chillis.
She also really liked the local panipuri. Little, crisp, hollow fried batter shells which, once broken into by an experienced thumb, are filled with warm, spicy chickpeas, dipped into a tangy-sweet tamarind chutney, dunked into and filled up in a container of cold, spicy tamarind water, and rapidly handed to you before it caves in from sheer amazement at its fate. Then you, quick as you can, pop them into your mouth to chomp and be stunned by the burst of textures and flavors, just recovering in time to reach out and grab the next already insistently being handed to you. This, usually six times, rapid-fire, and costing about 25c.
I wonder if we Indians are able to handle such gastronomic calisthenics simply because of the overactivity we subject our large buccal cavities to. I’m also very glad she was able to sample the local, and famous, kheemapao, a spicy mutton mince in gravy eaten with the ubiquitous pao bread. This once cheap meal was now expensive, costing me about $4!
Don’t underestimate the humble pao. At about 5 in the morning after a hard, hungry night in the lab, back in my hard, hungry Master’s days in university, I discovered that hot, freshly-baked pao liberally spread with butter, dipped in hot, sweet Mumbai chai, is a comforting experience of home and hearth, beyond description. Precious this is, in this rapid-moving, money-oriented, fend-for-yourself city, where no one would even stop if you dropped dead in a crowded train station. Believe me, I’ve seen it.
My humble attempts at making pao at home.
Not everything is a pao, which means if you are eating what people are claiming to be pao in Delhi, or Kolkata, or anywhere else, it’s not. It may have a form of paoliness, but don’t be fooled, esp. if they’re pulling them out of plastic packaging to serve you. I would say that these fake paos are about as close to the real thing as a Burger King burger in Delhi is to Henry’s Marrow-Spiked in Dallas. We Mumbaiites scoff at these yuppie nouveau paos.
Anyway, leaving that point for you to chew on, all this food for thought is making me hungry, so I’ll head over to the kitchen to see if there is anything edible lurking surreptitiously, trying to avoid notice. Just in passing, let me mention that it isn’t just food that slows life down in Mumbai for you to taste and enjoy it, but more on that in the next, and last, Mumbai post.
Sounds like an amazing city